Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are that collecting positive reviews has been a core part of your email marketing strategy for quite some time.
Most brands trigger automated review requests from software such as Reviews.io, Okendo or Yotpo to generate social proof. There is nothing wrong with this technique, but after you’ve hit 5,000 5-star reviews, how many more do you need to validate your product and how much of an impact will it make on revenue in testing to generate more?
And while qualitative feedback continues to be important, you may want to consider adding another source of reviews to bolster your store: Google Business Reviews.
Why are Google Business Reviews Important?
Yotpo, Okendo and Reviews.io are great starting points, but it’s hard to beat the authority that Google carries in the minds of consumers.
In addition to its brand authority, Google Business Reviews have some interesting secondary benefits as well, such as boosting SEO efforts.
And if you have an offline brick-and-mortar establishment, this can be an incredibly effective technique for promoting your local presence.
Here are some quick and effective ways to generate more positive reviews for your Google Business listing.
How to build a Google Review Flow in Klaviyo
There are a few ways to approach this, all of which have their merits.
1: Build a standard Product Review Flow
Depending on which eCommerce software you’re using, simply picking the “Placed Order” or “Fulfilled Order” metric will suffice here as the main trigger.
When you determine to send the actual review request is up to you, but for most brands, they tend to send it around 14 days after the order has typically been dispatched.
It can look like the following:
In terms of the content within the email, you’d simply want to direct them to your Google Business Page, like so:
Now, here is something a little more creative that will provide a better user experience.
Because leaving a review on Google typically requires an account, you can choose to add a conditional split to ensure their email domain is gmail before sending this request to someone:
That’s the first way. Super simple and straightforward.
2: Send a Google Review Request Only to Positive Reviewers
Moderating Google Reviews can be trickier than managing your own reviews on site, and you may want to preemptively hold off trying to get customers to review you on Google in case they’ve had a negative experience.
In this scenario you’ve got two options:
- Trigger a flow and Google Review Request after somebody leaves a positive review through your usual review software (i.e. Yotpo)
- Trigger a flow and Google Review Request after somebody leaves a positive Net Promoter Score (NPS) for your brand
Both follow the same logic and are simple to set up.
The first variation assumes you’re using Yotpo, but nearly all review integrations to Klaviyo will follow the same logic and triggers.
You should already have your integration to Yotpo setup within Klaviyo, the custom properties will be pulling into the platform accordingly:
Let’s assume that you only want to send a Google Review request to anybody who leaves a score of 5 on Yotpo.
You would trigger a subsequent review request via a segment of Yotpo reviewers of 5 or above, using the above logic.
The flow would look like this:
The second variation can be triggered off an NPS, which you may have set up natively within Klaviyo marketing or via another piece of third-party software.
Let’s say you trigger the NPS request 21 days after the customer orders - the email may look like this:
You want to trigger the subsequent follow-up request to ‘Promoters’ (people who leave a score of 9 or above via the NPS).
You would create a segment of people who had scored you a 9 or above and title this “NPS Promoters”. Then, we would trigger a flow off this segment to shuttle out the Google Review Request to ensure we’re only asking people likely to give us a high rating to leave the review:
Voila. Positive Google Reviews will now start flowing into your account on autopilot.
"As soon as I saw this idea I knew it would be a winner. We’d always had trouble getting a lot of positive reviews on places like Google local and Trustpilot. Negative or fake reviews are more likely to be posted on those channels because business owners can't easily moderate them. We use Loox for reviews and I set up the flow in Klaviyo in under 10 minutes. I use text emails and have an 80/20 split Google/Trustpilot. The results have been incredible! Over half my reviews on those channels have come through this method and are all 5 stars! Those pages also rank much higher now when you search “carved reviews” and the most recent are all 5 stars."
- John Webber, CEO, Carved
Final Thoughts
You can of course relax the criteria to abstain from people who haven’t only just left positive review scores via your traditional review software or NPS if you want to increase the velocity of Google Reviews you collect.
Additionally, consider adding in SMS branches for customers who have given consent here and adding the conditional split for Gmail users to ensure maximum response rate.
Whatever strategy you choose to deploy, don’t sleep on Google Reviews, they can be a great contributor to a businesses offline as well as online success.
I cover this more extensively in Monster Email Marketing where I spill the beans on the exact strategies I've used to win deals with 8-9 figure DTC brands and continuously drive an additional 15% revenue from every email campaign you send.
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